Dapps. Development. Design. Research. Kleros Community Update #3

We've been hard at work bringing the justice revolution to the world...

The Kleros team has been very active in the months since our last update. Our curated list experiment - Doges on Trial has gained a lot of traction, we made huge progress in building the next version of Kleros, called Athena. In that time we kicked off our new blog, presented at some of the largest and most important conferences in the space and launched our Fellowship of Justice program which attracted top talent to do research about Kleros.

Without further ado, let's dig in.

Doges on Trial Grand Finale

On July 31, just two weeks after our token sale, we launched our first experiment on the Ethereum mainnet to test the cryptoeconomic model that Kleros is built upon.

The explainer video of our Doges on Trial experiment.

The goal was to see whether Kleros is able to generate the right incentives for jurors to rule cases honestly, as well as testing the resilience of the platform to attacks by malicious agents. Doges on Trial was based on Kleros' curated list use case, which is a dispute resolution model for listing items in a decentralized way. One example of this kind of a model is an e-commerce platform wanting to curate the legitimate items to be offered in a decentralized way (for more information on how Kleros works for curated lists, read this article).

Interested to see the results and findings of the experiment? Check this three part series about user behaviour written by our cryptoeconomic researcher William George (part one, part two and part three). This is some great research which brings to light the details of human responses to real-life cryptoeconomic incentives.

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BUIDLing the Future of Justice

The development team has been up to a lot since our last update. The breakdown is into three main pieces - we've made significant progress towards Kleros' Athena release, we've been developing new product applications and we've been contributing to the broader ecosystem through the development of standards.

Athena Release

Named after the Greek goddess of wisdom, the Athena release brings several improvements in performance, design and user experience, based on two guiding principles: 1) user friendliness and 2) ease of integration.

User Friendliness

Driving user adoption is notably one of the main challenges in the blockchain industry. In order to achieve this, DApps need to make significant progress in enhancing the user experience. Athena was designed to be as similar as possible to traditional web applications, without sacrificing decentralization and trustlessness.

A key new feature is the integration with the Uniswap exchange protocol. This will greatly improve juror experience by helping them swap ETH and other tokens for PNK seamlessly without ever leaving the juror interface. The Athena release will also allow for the direct transfer of fiat to PNK, giving jurors yet more options to purchase our native token.

Ease of Integration

Kleros' vision is to develop an arbitration ecosystem on top of which many different applications will be built. Athena is a step in this direction, as it seeks to make third party app integration into Kleros' protocol as easy and straightforward as possible. Enrique Piqueras wrote about this at length in his great explainer piece for future partners, answering questions on how products can be integrated with Kleros.

Sneak peak at the Athena release UI. Here you can see the disputes currently needing arbitration from a juror perspective. In this UI, jurors review the evidence and make their judgements.

New Applications

In the last months, we also worked on the development of new applications which will contribute to new use cases: 1) a centralized arbitrator UI, 2) a token curated registry for ERC 20 tokens and 3) a general escrow service.

Centralized Arbitrator

How our centralized arbitrator UX currently looks.

The centralized arbitrator is an arbitrator controlled by a single account that rules directly. This can be used to test arbitrable contracts, or in set ups where off chain software computes the ruling and needs to bring it on-chain, or when a platform (e.g., a crypto e-commerce or exchange platform) needs to be able to overrule the enforcement of Kleros' decisions.

Token Curated Registry for ERC 20 Tokens

Devs have also been working on a token curated registry for ERC 20 tokens. Based on the cryptoeconomic principles already tested in the Doges on Trial pilot, this will greatly improve the token listing process in decentralized exchanges.

A mockup of our token curated registry for ERC 20 tokens. This service can be used by exchanges to delegate token curation to a neutral decentralized third party. It could greatly reduce scams and increase the quality of listings. Read this article to learn more about how Kleros can help in decentralized curated lists.When a token is challenged the 'hammer' will appear as in the top left square.

A General Escrow Service

The team has also been actively working on a General Escrow Service. This is a website where users will be able to make agreements for trading different goods and services and having Kleros as arbitrator.

An early mockup of our escrow service, which allows parties to easily make escrow transactions arbitrated by Kleros. This can serve several use cases such as domain name transfers, freelancing agreements and e-commerce, among many others.

Arbitration Standards ERC 792 and ERC 1497

Besides the development of the Kleros' protocol, in the past months we also made a contribution to the shared infrastructure of the broader decentralized arbitration ecosystem.

In December 2017, we had proposed the ERC 792 smart contract standard for allowing a plug-in/plug-out mechanism for arbitrable contracts (learn more in this explainer video by Enrique). Now we also proposed the ERC 1497 evidence standard that seeks to homogenize how evidence and information is managed within decentralized arbitration. We look forward to contributions by other actors in the ecosystem!

Kleros Research

Kleros Research, led by the great William George, has focused on studying post-dispute insurance, price oracles and analyzing the results of our Doges on Trial pilot.

Improving Post Dispute Insurance

Kleros is developing a mechanism of post dispute insurance which allows agents to provide funding for the losing party to appeal a ruling. This is intended to avoid "bank attacks" where deep pocket agents take advantage of the lack of resources of a losing party to appeal an unfair ruling.

We have researched how to structure the growth of appeal fees in a way that encourages participation from insurers. In particular, we are interested in allowing for crowdsourced insurance where users can adopt some portion of a user’s appeal fees in exchange for the chance to win a corresponding part of a stake placed by the party on the other side of that dispute.

Under certain assumptions regarding the existence of rational insurers, we have been able to prove guarantees about the resistance of the system to bank attacks.

Price Oracles

We have adapted our previous work on price oracles to a version where Kleros disputes required by the oracle run in parallel. This allows the oracle to execute faster with less potential for time griefs. This is relevant to applications that are sensitive to the time required to get the value produced by the oracle on-chain.

William George, Kleros' cryptoeconomic researcher, speaking at the Fields Institute for Research in the Mathematical Sciences. Watch here.

Fellowship of Justice

After analyzing several dozen applications, we have selected the participants that will take part in the first generation of the Kleros Fellowship of Justice Program. This program was created to foster research on different topics relevant to Kleros from the perspective of computer science, cryptoeconomics, law and business.

Accepted participants include researchers from Stanford, J.P. Morgan, London School of Economics and the University of Leicester. We will soon publish a post to introduce them to the community.

Spreading the Word

Kleros deals with ground-breaking, experimental tech. A key part of our job is to communicate our work to the wider expert community and discuss all aspects of future research and implementation. Here are some of the highlights of the past couple of months:

Members of the team have also been around the world participating in podcasts and conferences in Colombia, Uruguay, Israel, Dominican Republic, the US, Switzerland and Czech Republic among many others.

Clément and myself, speaking at the prestigious Epicenter podcast. August 2018.Presenting Kleros at the Faculty of Engineering at Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Córdoba, Argentina, September, 2018.Presenting Kleros at the ORT Uruguay University. Montevideo, September 2018. Watch the video of the presentation here (in Spanish).I was invited as a keynote speaker at a conference organized by Colombian legal publishing company Legis to speak about the future of legal systems. In this talk, I review some key trends in the legal industry such as artificial intelligence, blockchain and, of course, Kleros. Bogotá, September 2018.Clément presenting at the Ethfinex Governance Summit in Lugano, Switzerland. September, 2018.Stuart and Clément with most of the Ethereum Blockchain ecosystem at the Ethfinex Conference in Lugano. September, 2018.Sharing the stage with legal futurist Joe Raczynski at the Thomson Reuters Generate 2018 in London, in front of all the major law firms in the United Kingdom. September 2018.An interview about the future of law published at the Colombian newspaper, Ambito Jurídico. October 2018.With corporate and government officials at Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic), after accepting an invitation by the government to deliver a keynote on blockchain and Kleros. October 2018.Kleros' co-founder Nicolas Wagner won third prize at the Liberland Hackathon in Tel Aviv, where he developed an escrow solution for the stability of Liberland's financial markets.Clément, presenting the curated list use case of Kleros at the World Blockchain Forum 2018. New York City, November 2018.

Kleros at Devcon4

At the beginning of November, most of the Ethereum universe converged on the Golden City of Prague for the largest event of the year - Devcon. Our team gathered from all corners of the globe to discuss and work on the ecosystem as a whole.

With Sam, Ferit, Enrique, Stuart, Nico and William at Devcon. November 2018.

As you can see, Kleros has been hard at work bringing the justice revolution to the world. We are very open to having more people join our discussion and our cooperative, if you are interested - feel free to check out this article to find out how YOU can become part of us!

Become a Juror

You can always sign up to become a juror adding your email to a mailing list. Use of our juror platform is fully decentralized of course but this lets us get in touch to notify of any pilots or real Dapp's ready for you to arbitrate on.